Page:Evolution and Natural Selection in the Light of the New Church.djvu/5

Rh according to the speciﬁc use for which they are created; thus it is that every part of each organism is perfectly adapted to accomplish its own special work. Man is not a merely automatic recipient of life from God; but, different from all other created forms, he is endowed by his Creator with rationality, liberty, and immortality; therefore he is a responsible being, having within him all the faculties necessary to his endless progression in spiritual as well as in natural things, and having duties to perform towards God and his neighbor as well as to himself.

To suppose that a germ was created, or, as the Darwinian theory supposes, by some unknown process came into existence, containing the inherent power to develop into the numberless forms of use and beauty in the world around us, would be to suppose that such a germ was in itself a microcosm—a little world; and even that such germ had within it the power and attributes of a Creator. The various forms of creation, prior to man, were all prophetic and typical of the coming human race; but man alone, as the New Church teaches, is the microcosm—the epitome of the macrocosm, or the great world.

The New Church teaches that each created form in the world of nature has its distinctive spiritual essence, which is its animating formative soul; and that both the essence and form are intimately connected by a spiritual law—the law of Analogy or Correspondence, that is, the mutual relation of form to essence, of essence to form. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the ﬁrst material human body was conceived in the womb of a female ape, from whence did the human essence or soul—the seat of spiritual and mental consciousness and intelligence—ﬁrst come? Surely it is too gross a thought to suppose that the ﬁrst